Twentieth-century Brazilian art is known for its hugely influential avant-garde and countercultural movements. One might think, for example, of the poesia concreta or concrete poetry movement pioneered by Décio Pignatari and Haroldo and Augusto de Campos in the 1950s, or of the equally subversive, cross-genre Tropicalismo or Tropicália movement led by musicians and lyricists Caetano Veloso and Gilberto Gil in the 1960s.
Categories — like “Pacific,” like “poetry,” like “feature” — are meant to contain places, genres, ideas, and yet this one cannot. As its editor, I can perhaps live with the word “feature,” even as it also points toward containment, but I cannot fathom the Pacific. While most readers of Jacket2 will be aware of the term “Pacific rim,” which like a basketball hoop contains the emptiness inside it, those of us who live on Pacific islands think of them as foremost a “basin,” as Oceania, a place that cannot be so easily defined, lineated.
